Fortinet Delivers Wireless Solution for Mumbai Public Wi-Fi Network

Maharashtra Information Technology Corporation (MITC) has selected Fortinet technology to provide Wi-fi connectivity in 500 hotspots at prominent public places in Mumbai city and suburbs including the offices of Mumbai Police Commissioner, Vidhan Bhavan, KalaNagar in Bandra and Bombay High Court.

Mumbai is the commercial capital and the largest city in India. It is home to a whopping 20.5 million people and the city contributes to 5 % of India's GDP making it the wealthiest city in South, West and Central Asia. The Government of Maharashtra launched the MumbaiWiFi project to cover all major areas in the city with public WiFi hotspots to ensure all government services are available online to its citizens. The Wi-Fi network is also planned to be used for smart parking and smart transportation, to provide real-time updates on the routes and available capacity of the various modes of public transport in the city.

In its first phase of MumbaiWiFi project the Maharashtra Government has deployed 550 Fortinet OAP832e outdoor Access Points with omni-directional antennas, 50 AP832i indoor Access Points, two FortiWLC-3000D wireless controllers and FortiWLM-1000D wireless manager to provide safe and secure internet access to the public in Mumbai city as part of the state governments digital empowerment program. Fortinet ruffled a few leaders in the wireless space to win the deal as the competition failed to meet the very stringent delivery deadlines in this mega project.

"MumbaiWiFi project plays a crucial role in empowering our citizens digitally. Our goal was to cover all major areas in the city with public WiFi in order to make important government services available online. Because of the hyper-connected nature of our public infrastructure today, an ambitious project like this requied technology that could scale and be flexibile to enable more users, devices, and applications over time.” said Vijay Kumar Gautam, Principal Secretary Information Technology, Government of Maharashtra.

Fortinet outdoor and indoor Access Points have been deployed at 500 locations across Mumbai city and were fully operational in January 2017. The Access Points have a unique Wi-Fi channel management architecture called Virtual Cell which simplifies deployment and scaling, and enables a number of compelling quality user experience advantages. These include superior voice mobility due to zero-handoff roaming, and more reliable user connections due to real-time load balancing based on actual traffic.

Two FortiWLC 3000D controllers have been deployed to optimizes traffic across the network to support high density and high performance requirements of this large public network. A FortiWLM 1000D Wireless Manager is utilized to manage the network infrastructure and to provide additional configuration and performance capabilities. In a trial run between 2 to 8 January, 2017, around 23,000 users signed up into MumbaiWiFi network and downloaded more than 2TB (TetraByte) data.

"We are very pleased that the Maharashtra Government chose to deploy Fortinet Wireless Solutions as part of this prestigious project." said Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, SAARC for Fortinet. "Fortinet is uniquely able to support this project with our Wireless R&D center at Bangalore lending the required technical expertise. High-availability, speed and density of coverage are all must haves in a public Wi-Fi network and our solutions have demonstrated that they can perform in the most demanding environment without compromise.”